Tuesday May 5th Breakfast was served slowly this morning. Somehow, our pancakes never did arrive. But the flat bread, butter, apricot jam and two milky coffees for Anthony and one black coffee for me were enough. Post breakfast we took a walk around the town to find the post office so that we could take some money out from a hole in the wall and post our postcards. With Ramadan shutting everything down and leaving so few people about to ask we did not find it. Rolando got his lift to the local Plage, which was twenty mins drive out of town. From the distance of the road La Plage looked like a miniature version of the Welsh village of Port Merion, varying shades of white and shadows all in a small block. We could tell were houses that were close together, but together they also seemed most undistinguished.
There had to be drama with our generosity. The road directly to La Plage was to be found down a invisible left turn, that naturally Anthony could not see from the being in the drivers seat. For not seeing the invisible turning we parked around the other side, took the long way to the beach, where the buildings in front of the beach were were frankly tatty, even the dogs looked as if they had been to better places. Anthony walked back to the car and drove around the other side whilst Rolando and I were to wait for him. Except that after waiting a while we walked back along the road in the heat to look for Anthony since he seemed to be taking some time. We walked as far as we could and did not see him anywhere. We walked back to where Anthony was meant to be and there he was. The arch on the beach was just like all stone arches are, I photographed it but more as a record than a picture with an aesthetic to it. Roland walked along the beach to the arch, he was going to walk back to Sidi Ifni. I returned to Anthony and we drove away.
On our own and in the car, we returned to Sidi Ifni and found two post offices, one with a cash point to get money which seemed to have no post box and another more central to the town where we found a post box to post our cards in. If the postal service is as efficient as the french postal service, the french being the former colonists, then the cards should arrive promptly.
The drive around the port side, a little way out of the town, pleased Anthony enormously after the confusion and blandness of La Plage. Seeing the five horses reined on a line between two vehicles reminded us of how this is a landscape where travel is the point of it; settling is the exception even though settling has become the norm for many.
Anthony slept in the afternoon. So did Sidi Ifni from what I saw of it as I walked around. Though I did find some sort of activity in the local market, people were congregating to drink and chat in one crowded cafe. But there were no other stalls, stalls for goods, open. Still when places are shut, whether for the day or for Ramadan, the more photogenic they are the more they tempt visiting guests with cameras to get them out and snap away.
A closed town is a town that does not mind it's doorways being photographed. There were plenty of doors that made ready made attractive pictures, even as my memory went back to dentist I went to as a teenager, Mr Taylor, and the poster 'the doors of Dublin that he put on the ceiling to distract children he was treating, whilst he did things to their teeth. Harder to photograph was the combined effects of the flat roofs which Anthony described and being 'Like something Paul Klee would have drawn inspiration from', as if Klee had come here for his holidays and come away with news ideas.
Night number two for eating at our hotel. We face the same dilemma that we faced before. What is there on the menu that we would find interesting that we have not already had once? Anthony had the right idea, a chat with the hotelier about the different things they could do with different vegetables. So along came aubergine caviar, a cucumber tomato and lettuce salad, and four rather filling vegetable pancakes. All rather splendid. No pudding looked like arriving so we left. Rolando appeared late at the table next to ours, sun burnt but happy from his long walk back from where we had left him late this morning.
Anthony returned to his book, I completed another postcard and set out in the dusk to walk to the post office. Ramadan was truly over, women and children were out together walking the streets and men filled the cafes having their mint tea or soft drinks, the television screens set to news in the background. All television news channels look the same after a while, ticker tape headlines across the bottom of the screen, bright synthetic colours behind the soberly dressed presenter, and overlapping boxes with the latest written information in them above the moving ticker tape. Misinformation overload.
The souk/market was fully open too. I bought another hat that I did not need there, but the colours on it-green gold and white against black-were perfect, after finding yet another post box to put a card in. Meanwhile in 'The Holy City' a display of women's underwear in the biggest, newest, shop window in the town gets the (all male) councillors hot under the collective collar. But they find that there is nothing they can do about it. It read like my memories of where I grew up, false/mock outrage, social stasis, reactions but also a sense of values being frozen, of change achieved through denial of change.
For Day 7 of this Holiday Memoir please click here.
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